It's Been a Good Year For the Rosés..

Wine is complex, multi-layered and confusing so anything that helps to simplify things for the consumer is seized upon. Vintages are talked about using broad brush strokes – this one is brilliant, that one is awful. ‘Vintages of the century’ are declared with unlikely regularity.

In reality, things are rarely that simple. Even in the best vintages, some wines will be awful and amid the rain and rot of a poor year someone will have triumphed against the odds. And, of course, most vintages are neither wonderful nor terrible, but somewhere in between. Generally, the most overlooked vintages are those that follow on from the brilliant years.

In Bordeaux, 2001 and 2006 were widely damned for not being as good as 2000 and 2005 and only now are people beginning to realise that perhaps they have been too quick to judge. There are plenty of excellent wines at good prices from those initially maligned vintages.

So it is with the 2008 Rhones. Their predecessors, the 2007s, were hailed for their richness, concentration and sex appeal. The critic Robert Parker called it his “greatest ever vintage” and awarded a staggering ten wines a ‘perfect’ 100 points just a few weeks before the 2008 were to be released. The latter have now come into the world without any hype and many will be quickly forgotten as collectors scramble around for the last few cases of those ‘perfect’ 2007s.

All this is a terrible shame. There are some excellent wines from the Rhone in 2008, wines with typicity, true terroir expression and fresh, vibrant fruit. They won’t last forever but will offer some wonderful drinking over the short-term.

The vintage’s main problem – apart from the fact it followed 2007 – was a torrential downpour in early September. Puddles in the vineyards the next morning made for a very sorry sight. Many wrote the wines off there and then.

When we returned 12 months on, we found out things were far from lost. Provence’s secret weapon, the Mistral wind, had followed the rain and blown down the valley, drying the grapes. The clouds held off for the rest of the autumn and allowed the growers to save the vintage.

Louis Barroul of Chateau de St Cosme in Gigondas is a garrulous, extroverted character who presides over his labyrinth-like cellars like the master of a Victorian workhouse. We had visited him the day after the downpour last year, when he feared the worst. On our return in September we found Louis much more bullish about the vintage: “2008 is similar to 1997 and much better than 2002 – the wines are neat and precise. Although we had 300mm of rain in September, the pure limestone soils drained the water quickly and didn’t have the usual hydric stress. The alcohol level is the same as ’98, which shows that ripening was not so bad.”

In fact, across the region we found that diligent winemakers who had carefully sorted their grapes to select only the very best had performed much better than we could ever have expected.

One notable feature of the vintage is that most Chateauneuf du Pape producers have produced only one red wine. The ultra-expensive, glossily-oaked super cuvées of recent years were abandoned in 2008, meaning that the best grapes and barrels have all made it into the ‘regular’ bottlings. As such, the quality of these has been greatly improved and the wines represent the very best the properties could make in 2008 giving a genuine expression of the terroir and the vintage.

Parker’s renewed enthusiasm for 2007, and his rash of 100 point scores, will inevitably drive up demand and prices for those wines. The 2008s could end up looking very good value in comparison.